The Key Issue of Illegal Immigration – Why is it so Important?

The key issue of illegal immigration is talked about constantly. And for good reason – it is a huge issue facing most Western nations.

So let’s stop for a minute, and review the reasons why it’s such a paramount issue in our society.

Cost

1. Illegal immigrant households cause a net fiscal burden of around $54.5 billion per year.
2. Amnesty could cause unprecedented amount of expense ($2.6 TRILLION).
3. Immigrants use substantially more social services and welfare programs than natives.
4. The cost of that welfare is also higher than natives.
5. Medicaid, alone, would take a hit of $48.6 billion from amnesty.
6. Immigrants destroy the wages of the poor, low-skilled natives.

Taxes

This is an obvious one. Increased illegal immigration increases taxes through various reasons, including:

• Fiscal burden of providing medical services to those without insurance.
• Increased border patrol and police activity from a higher crime rate.
• Increased costs on schools, thus increased local and state-wide taxation for school programs.
• We receive less in taxes from illegals than the cost we incur from having them.
• Prison sentences and holding illegals that have committed crime domestically.

Jobs

Immigration has caused tremendous impacts on the labor side of the market, which negatively impacts low-wage earners and availability of solid employment prospects.

It’s also a good idea to consider these aspects:

• There is no evidence of a labor shortage in this country.
• For every new job there are two new immigrants, even when natives can’t find work.
• Illegal immigrants rarely have transferable skills, and thus replace low-skilled natives.
• ALL employment growth from 2000-2014 went to immigrants.

Crime

Foreign born nationals tend to have a statistically significant correlation to crime increases.

• Immigrants represent 20% of the prison population while only being 15.4% of the total population.
• Illegals, specifically, 26.4% of federal prisoners are non-citizens, while only being 8.6% of the total population.
• Census data from 2007 showed an increase of 146% in immigrant incarceration from 2000-2007, while the immigrant population only raised by 22%
• In 2009, 57 of the 76 fugitives wanted for murder were foreign born.

Drugs/Addiction

The increased incarceration rates many times come from drug arrests.

Often, drug users and sellers are not employed or are under-employed. Thus contributing less to society as a whole.

Not only this, but obviously the drug epidemic has a large impact on Western society. With the easy availability of drugs, typically coming from outside the US borders, it causes more natives citizens to become addicts.

And have a means of continuing their addiction.

As one reporter puts it:

Drug Trafficking and Illegal Immigration: Drug smuggling and money laundering have been practiced for hundreds of years, but globalization has raised drug trafficking to a multitrillion dollar international business. U.S. authorities have witnessed and felt the deleterious effects of both the narcotics trade and the illegal immigrants who transport the drugs into the country. The illegal drug market in the United States is one of the most lucrative in the world.

It is without a doubt that the vast majority of these drugs come into the United States through illegal immigrant smuggling routes.

Changing Culture

The effect on culture cannot be overstated. Typically, illegal immigrants fail to adapt to the national culture in the United States.

This presents a lot of problems on a societal level. How are we supposed to protect what made our country as successful as it is – when others don’t respect or admire it’s founding traditions that have led to that success?

Illegal immigrants, and some immigrant groups in general – sway our culture to their previous one. Socialism would have never been anticipated as a policy platform back in the founding days or in the early 20th century.

However, Bernie Sanders just ran on that type of campaign in 2016. This is from a cultural sway, which has been at least partially because of immigrants inability to assimilate or respect the countries founding cultural ties.

It also has ties with the rise of globalism. And the inevitable negative repercussions that globalization causes on wealthy-state natives.

Changing Political Landscape

As mentioned above, illegal immigrants tend to bring their countries traditions with them.

These traditions can have extremely anti-American philosophies.

It is prominent for other citizens to rely on the government for many things. It is also common for illegal immigrants to come from places with high taxes in exchange for these governmental services.

Many countries also have strong ties to corruption, so it becomes more common-place to just ignore the corruption issue than try to address and fix it.

These tend to be anti-traditional American values. The ones that made this country so successful. Things such as un-hinged freedoms, and “no taxation without representation” being core motto’s.

Immigrants can have a hard time understanding and adapting to these traditions. And may prefer to just vote in their old ones back.

This results in immigrants:

• Favoring a larger scope and size of government
• Favoring redistribution programs
• Overwhelming voting democrat
• Coming from predominately socialist governments and keeping those beliefs

National Security

Finally, illegal immigration also drastically increases national security concerns.

Things such as:

• 380 of 580 terror related incidents since 9/11 where from foreign born nationals.
• Politicians begin to fear working on national security for fear of being deemed anti-immigrant.
• Lax screening tools to meet excessive amounts of immigrant refugees.
• Low rates of vaccination in immigrants could cause significant harm to native populations.
• The overall health of natives could be at risk from a variety of diseases typically landlocked to a specific area.

Key Issue of Illegal Immigration – Conclusion

The key issue of illegal immigration is a topic well worth diving into. There’s a lot of subtle pros and cons that most people don’t consider – and that rarely come up in debate or academic literature.

We need to be mindful of these issues to satisfactorily come up with a solution.

A world ruled by socialist-styled governments is not one which I would want to leave my children. We need to find ways to either assimilate immigrants into the American culture, or stop immigration out-right.

Or we will lose all of the traditions that made American great.